Vaporum

Its a nice smaller steampunk dungeon crawler. You have amnesia and waking up on island in front of some strange lonely tower. Of course, our hero have to check what's inside! Mad robots everywhere and you seems to be somehow connected with this madness. Well, still better than Grimrock's story, right?! You control just one character. so no party creation in here, no dialogs, no deep story. Sadly, used RPG skill system is trully minimalistic. To be honest, whole first floor wasnt much fun. It looked like a cheap indie RPG with steampunk flavour. This sounds badly, but hearth of this game is somewhere else As a Grimrock this game is all about fighting throught enemies and traps in tower and solving many puzzless oddly placed into this steampunkish tower. Puzzles are relatively easy, but funny. Main plus of this game are two things: dark claustrophobic atmosphere and mostly combat! Combats arent much original, but they are challenging, very satisfying and trully fun! You are fighting usualy in very small closed areas. Your only chance for survive on higher difficulty levels is turn based slow mode, which can be enabled anytime you want. And dont you think you will be overpowered in late game. Difficulty of fights slowly growing up, so good tactic and looking for best equipement is a key for survive. Fights were great from start to finish. True reason why to play this to finish. Good job, devs! Only cons here is final combat. Its kinda unfair, especialy on higher difficulties. And opened ending sucks. Overaly nice little dungeon crawler with focus on combats!

The game is not good. There are instakill pitfalls with no autosave. There is a fairly limited character progression. All of the combat is just one ambush after another with zero creativity. There are a lot of other problems with the game that you can see in other people's reviews. I have no idea what they attempted to achieve, but making a fun, enjoyable game was probably not among their plans.

This game was certainly good for scratching that Grimrock itch. Combat is a core part of this game, the monsters were diverse, but they could mostly be taken out with the same strategy. I played the game as a mage. Battles consisted of strike, move, area of effect, move strike, with minimal variation. Combat itself moves a little faster than it did in grimrock: to be surrounded is death... but monsters are handicapped by their movements: every one of them can be kited (because they can't move/turn quite as fast as you) and AoE spells will get them as they try to close in. Combat really consisted of this for me, and I can't tell if I was exploiting the system or playing it as it was meant to be played. I don't know if this is because I slipped into a strategy that worked for me. The puzzles were a little heavy on the "move blocks around" front; aside from that, I don't really have complaints, they consisted of: timed movement exercises, scavenger hunts, and lever based password challenges. None of these were particularly unforgiving or tedious (with the exception of an extended scavanger hunt for library books). The narrative wasn't particuarly compelling. You have little to no memory, you wake up at the base of a tower, and there are monsters in it. It turns out to be a research facility; you're looking for you daughter and wife; something went bad while folks were researching an exotic, deep sea material. I never really cared about the protagonist or felt caught up in the mystery, but it was a fun dungeon crawl, and the voice acting didn't offend me. The secrets were a little too well hidden in most cases. I used guides after I cleared a level to pick up what I missed... and more often than not there was some little bolt that needed to be twiddled in order to open a door. I'm sure someone with more patience could have found them naturally, and I found about half of them on my own. All things considered. It was fun; I'd get another one from the devs.

A fresh take on the Grimrock formula, with enough unique elements to make it worth buying even if you're Grimrocked-out. Obviously, the setting and plot are different. Ogres and wizards are out; robots and augmented humans are in. While the steampunk genre is no longer particularly novel, it is very refreshing to find a dungeon crawler which is anything other than Tolkien-like fantasy. The aesthetics of this are well represented in the graphics too: it's nice to see a whirring clockwork machine or a tangle of pipes to break up the stone-wall-fatigue that crawlers so often suffer from. Character progression feels fresh too. As a solo adventure, rather than a party-based affair, levelling up is reduced to deciding what part of your exo-suit you wish to upgrade. This leads to decisions such as whether to have a defense-heavy strategy, or high damage output, or a focus on (sufficiently advanced) technology. It's similar to deciding how to balance a traditional party, but involves a lot less time clicking character sheets. There are enough standard features to scratch your traditional crawler itch. Movement is grid-based and puzzles are often based around the limitations of your movement. Combat is in real time (allowing pausing) and rewards strategic use of different abilities and weapon sets. The diabolical plot is revealed to the player through written notes and audio recordings as they explore. There are secret areas and treasures to reward thorough exploration, but the game's difficulty is balanced to not require the player to comb the levels in order to survive.

This game is a take on the Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder or Legend of Grimrock dungeon crawler formula, with a very well realized steampunk aesthetic and a single player character instead of a party of 4. If you liked any of those games you're going to like this one too, 'nuff said. And as a nice bonus, the main character is voiced by Sebastian "Frost" Ruiz from the Cold Take series of video essays on YouTube.